About Dragon’s Teeth

My Hawaiian Airlines experience was exactly what one would expect from a plane tasked with whisking vacationers to a tropical destination. I stepped from that Aloha shuttle into a Hawaii I did not expect.  Maui’s Kahalui Airport’s terminal carpeting was musty.  The walls were concrete.  The air conditioning was…lacking.  I manhandled luggage along a hallway with an open wall.  Not a wall of open windows.  An actual wall that didn’t exist, so my startled skin, used to the bottled plane air, adjusted to a breeze puffing with exertion from running down green hills.  Palm trees bent to diagonals by the trade winds, and I smelled what? orchids? mangoes? nutmeg? A tropical fruit air freshener dangling from a car’s rearview mirror? My Pittsburgh nose can sniff out industrial pollution.  It struggles to process the off-gas of orchids and mangoes.

Let’s unpack my postcard expectations for this Hawaiian destination.  Scratch the polish, glitz, and five-star glamour.  I had to reconsider Maui.

The memorable people I encountered in Maui were locals.  I found few “Four Season advertisement” tourists.  Instead, Hawaiians hung out in multi-generational groups overflowing picnic tables and pitching tents at the beach’s edge.  Hanging empty orange juice bottles from trees in which to extinguish cigarette butts.  Playing Fiji soundtracks that looped from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening.  Straddling surfboards in the low, lazy rollers 30 yards off shore.  

These were the smells, sounds, and people of Maui.  Nothing over-packaged or over-produced.  Imperfectly perfect people living in an environment that challenged postcard expectations.  From the moment the palm trees waved to me from the airport tarmac to when sea turtles rolled unconcerned eyes while munching seaweed on tidal lava rocks, nature was the thing I labored to capture in 1,000 pictures.  Can I tell you about the ocean around the island?  I cannot.  An adjective to describe the blue of Maui’s water simply does not exist in the English language.  I’ve tried them all.  They’re all at least a shade off.

Maui challenged me to reconsider.  

There’s a certain latitude and longitude on this island that particularly invites reconsideration.  Makaluapuna Point on the Kapalua coastal trail, an isolated outcrop of lava cliffs just off of the grounds of The Ritz Carlton on West Maui.  Guidebooks give careful directions.  Some tourists find the spot, if they wear brave enough shoes to navigate spikes of lava that wind and wave have thrown skyward, earning the nickname “Dragon’s Teeth.”

I ventured beyond the teeth to the flattened end of the cliff (would this be the dragon’s molars?), and there came upon a point of reconsideration.  21.0071° N, 156.6559° W.  The labyrinth.

Spirals of white coral rocks kept a low enough profile to be missable, and therefore serendipitous, when I trekked close enough to realize the intentionality of rock placement.  My mind registered “Labyrinth,” but the more appropriate word to define my expectation would be “Maze.”  I thought first of a branching puzzle constructed by right turns and wrong turns, dead ends and a single, elusive finish point.  My mistaken definition was predicated upon the Greek myth of Theseus and the monstrous Minotaur.  Also, an admittedly less esoteric influence would be crazy-haired David Bowie’s monstrosity of a muppet-populated movie  titled “The Labyrinth” that terrified me out of my young mind in the 1980s with a maze’s power to deceive, defeat, confuse, and conceal.  

A classical labyrinth is not a maze. A maze is a branching, multicursal puzzle meant to entrap, trick, and end at a lurking monster.   A labyrinth is unicursal, giving no choice in direction, just a forced, circuitous path to the center.

Labyrinths are designed to have a final goal that can be predicted and therefore trusted.  It’s the journey to the middle that’s meant to be unexpected.  Twists and turns lead forward, tantalizingly close to the middle end goal, and then sweep back out to the farthest edges before spiraling off in another clover-leaf of turns.  The journey through a unicursal labyrinth may challenge faith along the way, but onward will always end successfully.  

I discovered the Makaluapuna Point labyrinth and paced out its turns.  I submitted to the patience demanded by the process.  My flip-flops gathered mud, evidence of other labyrinth-travelers in ruts worn between windswept grass and white coral rocks defining the unicursal path.

I don’t know to whom to give credit for this place of serendipity.  Maui’s Dragon Teeth labyrinth was constructed as a gift to the universe by some anonymous builder in 2005.  Clifford Nae’ole, the cultural advisor at the nearby Ritz-Carlton, shares the insight: “This revered location is a sacred site used for Hawaiian protocol and cultural practices.  It is considered a jumping-off point for souls as they make their transition from this existence to the next.”

I fear the ridge of frozen lava lining Dragon’s Teeth, the cliff peppered by waves spitting and clawing their way up to me.  Away from that edge in the labyrinth, I’m more concerned with staying firmly rooted to the earth rather than jumping off into the wild-(lacking adjective)-blue yonder of the Pacific Ocean.  My soul is not yet ready for that (capital-T) Transition.  But something about the winding, unpredictable, purposeful path of the labyrinth provides balm for my soul in (lower-case-t) transitions.

On my phone, the 1,000 Maui pictures from January 2020 are now separated by 1,000 pictures of life home in Pittsburgh.  I dropped my children off at school today for the first time in six months.  Because of the state of the world in 2020, we’ve done half a year of school at home, fighting for internet bandwidth.  We have a literal line taped down the middle of a desk, distinguishing “her side” from “her side.”  This morning, I watched my girls step from our car to the curb of the school sidewalk.  In their backpacks they carried notebooks, pencils, and hand sanitizer.  They wore their first day of school outfits.  They wore face masks.

The first day of school, annually, is a tempest in a teapot for me.  I am both elated (for the hours I will not compete for internet bandwidth or shared oxygen), and deflated (over lost summer freedom and lost connection of parallel working lives.)

I have not found a straightforward path through these emotions. No point A to B to untangle the discomfort, worries, and joys of these days.  I am a labyrinth doubling back on itself and getting tangled in another clover leaf.  I love return to school.  I hate return to school.  I plod forward, which sometimes takes me backward, but I trust I’m heading somewhere.

Perhaps that’s what draws me to the labyrinth: the certain end of an uncertain path.  I believe there might be a kinder, not so crazy-haired monster in this maze.  Not a “Monster” but a “Creator” whose intervention prepares me to jump-off, in the most meditative way possible, into the next wild-blueish-yonder.  A Creator who rearranges a multicursal maze of threatening minotaurs into something that looks alike but is not.  A labyrinth, winding, twisting, and uncertain along the journey, but always leading onward and forward to the safe, monster-less heart of the matter.  A promised plot of land reached at the end of the unicursal exile.  Rescue.  Trodding along that path, I will consider.  Then reconsider.  And the wonder, confusion, disappointment, and faith required to keep moving forward will end in a serendipity that redeems every step it took to arrive there.